Democracy 3 Going Electioneering In Next Expansion

Share this:

Ha ha hooo elections, eh? In that there politics. With the votes. And those things they say. With those ideas they have. Hitting the ole campaign trail. Kissing all that baby. Shaking a hand. Posing with them famous folks. And the things they say! Did you hear what that one said? And then the other one…? Putting papers through your door. Love it. Knocking on my door. Sitting inside my TV. Electioneering. Love ’em all. Happy times. Big japes. Shaky hands. Kissy face. Good jokes. Good jokes. Proper fun.

“For a long time, the Democracy games have basically been ‘government’ games, not election games. Making electioneering work in the context of Democracy 3 was not easy, because frankly every country has a very different electoral process, and electoral system. The US is NOTHING like the UK (We don’t have primaries or caucuses, for starters), and the way elections are fought is very different over the various countries that Democracy 3 models. (Another example: in the UK we have no political TV advertising). Eventually, I decided to take a few key areas of the election process, the ones that seemed universal, and model those, whilst letting the actual ‘mechanics’ of how an election is fought to remain abstract.”

I’m not sure how to feel about this. In my experience as it stands, every voter in Democracy 3 votes completely rationally based both on their ideology and identity. So in other words they have a perfectly clear understanding of what policies you’re enacting and what effect those policies are having on the country/world, and based on those policies they’ll either vote for you or an opposition whose defining trait is that they are ‘not you.’ In other words the other party never has any policies of their own, so a vote against you is more like a vote of no confidence than one for an alternative government.

In many respects this is gamey and unrealistic: people are misled, the effect of certain policies in real life can be disputed, and the opposition party usually proposes an alternative vision for government which is more than just ‘not the current guy/girl’.

Personally, though, I find the clarity and ease of reading this system to be ideal for a game, particularly one like Democracy where the emphasis is clearly on governing rather than reelection (as the statement says). I worry that any dilution of the system in place will have a really enormous impact on every aspect of the game and pretty much fuck up its essence.

This is why its being done as an expansion. People who prefer the original game can carry on without ever having this feature, and it can be turned on and off really easily for those who like it sometimes but not others.